Can flowers smile?

May 05, 2011

I bought a pot of flowers yesterday that I plan to give to my Mother-in-Law for Mother’s Day. I’m sure she doesn’t read this blog, so this shouldn’t ruin the surprise. They were so pretty, that I couldn’t resist asking them to pose for a few pictures before they leave for their new home. I had to wonder if the flowers were smiling as I posed them for the photo shoot? It sure seemed like they were cooperative! That’s why I love to practice my photography skills with inanimate objects!

I put very little thought into the photo above, I just simply plopped them on the table and snapped a picture. The background is a bit distracting, there isn’t much thought to the composition, and the backlighting sort of washes out the color of the flowers. A simple change of location can make a big difference.

My daughter happens to have a purple wall in her bedroom which worked as a nice backdrop. I set the pot on her white nightstand, opened her bedroom blinds, and I had a nice little tabletop studio to use. It’s much easier to see the details of the blooms and the pattern on the pot without the distractions of the previous setting.

My favorite way to photograph flowers is to get up close and personal with them. I love to see the variations of color in the petals, the texture of the natural design, and the delicate detail of their structure. Even their slight imperfections are beautiful.

By using a smaller f-stop number (using the Aperture setting on my Nikon D40) I focused on a specific part of the flower and let the background details blur a bit. I’ve linked all my photos from this post to my flickr EXIF information for each picture if you want to check out the camera settings I used.

I moved the flowers around to capture different lighting angles. I also played around with different distances between myself and the flowers. My favorites are definitely the photos where the blooms fill most of the frame.